Timeline photos
One day I was talking to a group of my homeless friends about shootings in Akron.
They were showing me scars where they had been shot and were talking about all the friends and family members they knew who had been shot.
At one point, I asked them to guess how many of my friends and family members outside of the homeless community they thought had been shot. They knew I was setting them up with a shockingly low number. Their guesses were around 1, 2, or 3.
NO ONE guessed the real number.
The number of any of my friends and family members outside of the homeless community who have ever been shot is: ZERO!
ZERO of my non-homeless friends and family members have been shot or even had close calls of being shot.
They literally had a hard time believing that.
And still today, outside of my homeless friends and family members, I still don't know anyone who has been shot. (That is woefully not the case when you include my homeless friends and family.)
1 person was killed, and 24 people were shot in the June 2, 2024, Akron Mass Shooting.
Lateris Cook (pictured here) is the 27-year-old man killed in Akron's mass shooting - on June 2, 2024.
I live in Ward 8. My guess is that every household that makes over $100,000 a year in Akron's Ward 8 will not be touched by this mass shooting or ANY of the shootings that occur in Akron.
So, it's just another day for us over here. We might as well be reading about a mass shooting in LA or St. Louis.
Ward 8 has the most money and votes the most. They vote the most because they believe in the system the most. That's because the system works for them because they have the most money. It's a circle jerk of money and power over here in Ward 8.
Our mayor is a perfect representation of the Ward 8 Neo-Liberal Elite Democrat that runs the Democratic Party in America and here in Akron. And he is actually a HUGE improvement over Dan Horrigan.
I tried my hardest to be the city council member for Ward 8. I got 30% of the vote in a two way contest. It certainly wasn't because people didn't know me that I lost. I lost by such a huge margin because Ward 8 knows EXACTLY who I am.
Ward 8 runs this town. And Ward 8 thinks it has no stake in what goes on in the heart of our city.
I'm here to tell you, and anyone that spends any amount of time at all on the streets of Akron can attest, Akron is rotting from the inside out.
This mass shooting isn't the product of one deranged individual. This mass shooting is the product of a cancerous tumor eating Akron from the inside out due to continually increasing income inequality and our leaders from top to bottom aren't doing one damn thing to make it better. In fact, everything they do is geared towards making it worse.
Shammas Malik made it very clear that he was focused on two things as mayor: Safety and Education.
Well, here's your chance Shammas. You now own a mass shooting. Has that EVER happened in Akron on this scale?
So, Shammas, I'll give you a clue as to why it's happening in some intellectual literary terms that maybe you and your Harvard education can relate to:
The streets of Akron are the epitome of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Conrad is implicitly commenting on imperialism, racism and exploitation imposed by European colonizers on Africans.
Today in America, we have sold all the jobs to the lowest bidders around the world, now the liberal elite is flooding America with more immigrants to continue to put downward pressure on wages and then we'll mop up everyone, including the immigrants, with AI and machine automation ASAP.
We're eating ourselves on the streets of American cities because America has become Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for inner-city people.
The industrialists and capitalists are savagely licking their greedy lips at the prospect that we may never have to rely on human production power ever again.
So, good luck making Akron a safer town, Shammas. It's not happening. It's WAY bigger than you. It's Joe Biden and the neo-liberal elite Democrats that are pushing this. And that's exactly who Shammas will be voting for and telling us to vote for in the next presidential election which is always “the most important election of our lives.”
He’ll be doing that, of course, in desperate hope that someone from the top will take notice of him and he can get out of this hell hole as soon as humanly possible.
The only way things are going to get better in America is if we vote Independent at the top.
I'll say it again:
Lateris Cook is the 27-year-old man killed in Akron's mass shooting on June 2 2024, not because of some "hoodlum." He was killed as a by-product of a dying empire run by bad people.